Fedora Magazine: Record a Screencast with the EasyScreenCast extension

Fedora Workstation — thanks to the GNOME Desktop — has a simple built-in function to take a screencast. However, if you require more control over how you take your screencasts, use the EasyScreenCast GNOME extension. This awesome extension has many additional features when compared to the built-in screencasting tool, including the taking videos of your screen longer than 30 seconds, audio recording from your microphone, and the ability to overlay your webcam output in your screen videos.

Recording a Screencast

After installing the extension, the EasyScreenCast icon will appear in the right of the top bar in Fedora Workstation. This is the menu you use for starting and stopping a screencast, as well as choosing the parameters for your screencast.

EasyScreenCast provides 4 modes for framing your videos, you can screencast your entire desktop (even if you have more than one monitor) or alternatively, can select a specific monitor. The other two modes are screencasting a specific window, or you can select an area of your screen to record.

Once you have decided on a mode, simply press the Start Recording item to start your screencast. The EasyScreenCast icon will turn red to indicate you are recording. When finished, choose the Stop Screencast item, and your video will play automatically from where it is saved ( ~/Videos/ by default.)

Recording sound and webcam video

The extension also allows you to record sound from your microphone, and overlay another video stream using your webcam as input. The options dialog provides the ability to tweak the quality of the webcam video, as well as the size and position of the overlay in the final result.

Note however, that during the recording of your screencast, the webcam video will not be on the screen, so it is useful to frame the shot of yourself first with a utility like Cheese.

Options, Options, Options

The options dialog provides a lot of additional options and features to play with how you record your screencasts, including:

Enabling a keyboard shortcut for starting and stopping screencasts

Showing a border around the recording area, to help you frame your video while it is recording

Turning on and off the notifications that pop up when a screencast begins recording

Not showing the cursor in your screencasts

Adjusting the quality and format of your screencasts with custom GStreamer pipelines

X? or Wayland?

EasyScreenCast still uses the built-in screencast functions of GNOME Shell, so, in theory, it works even when running the default Wayland session. Note, however, that that is a Known Issue with GNOME shell screen recording (and EasyScreenCast too), that may cause you some issues under Wayland.